So why has Disney returned to Tron now, almost three decades later? For all its flaws, Tron struck a plangent chord with the children of the computer revolution. Released in 1982 - the same year as the word "cyberspace" first saw print - it offered a glimpse of what it might be like to live with, and within, a virtual environment. Arcade games, still exotic at the time, became a point of entry to the even more alien realm of computer networks. We were just beginning to learn what it means to work and play with thinking machines - and what it means to be what Tron called a User.

Thirty years on, we're still learning. So can Tron: Legacy repeat the trick for 2010's audience?

The new film is less a belated sequel than a remake - or a "reimagining" (there's already been a Tron 2.0). That might work for the likes of Batman and Star Trek, where ageing hardware is ultimately less of an issue than antiquated social mores: spaceships, at least, evolve more slowly than computers. By contrast, many of Tron's conceits are now the stuff of everyday life.

What would it be like to be immersed in a virtual world? Meet World of Warcraft. What would it be like to play a video game "for real"? Try Kinect. What kind of images do computers make? Underwhelming ones - unless they're indistinguishable from reality - in which case, what's the (aesthetic) point?

So how does Tron: Legacy attempt to outdo Moore's law? In the most obvious way: with swooshier graphics than we can yet get on our PCs - or phones. That's as sophisticated as it gets. Over the past 20 years, computers have turned social. We don't teleport into cyberspace; we're embedded in it. The network has overtaken the desktop, never mind the mainframe. But none of this is reflected in Legacy.

The back story provides a serviceable rationalisation for this insularity. Tron's vectorised cityscape, populated by anthropomorphised programs, has been sealed off for decades. Its architect, Kevin Flynn, has gone both off-grid and off-Grid, abandoning his flesh-and-blood son in the real world and his digital doppelganger in the virtual. So the setting is more like a simulated world than the internet.

This scenario isn't without possibilities - as The Matrix and its ilk demonstrated - but they amount to little more than throwaway plot tokens in Tron: Legacy. "Genetic algorithms, quantum teleportation," burbles the elder Flynn - Jeff Bridges, borrowing heavily from his turn as The Dude in The Big Lebowski - as he describes the wonders concealed in his creation. "Biodigital jazz," he enthuses at the spontaneous emergence of artificial life forms in his open system.

Of course, it's not really fair to expect a movie like Tron: Legacy to say much about the modern technological condition. But its plot seems to go out of its way to avoid any kind of relevance, opting instead for by-the-numbers action-movie clichés. Thrill-seeking wunderkind reluctant to live up to his responsibilities? Check. Paternal estrangement? Check. Feisty female sidekick? Check. A libertarian utopia degraded into totalitarian "bread and circuses"? Check. A quest? Check. The One True Ring Disc? Check.

What it is fair to expect, on the other hand, is that Tron: Legacy should excel when it comes to eye candy, and in purely technical terms it does. Tron's game discs and light cycles get made over, and there's minutely detailed new hardware to keep the fans and franchisees happy. The overall effect is calculatedly cool: sleek surfaces, minimalist architecture, tasteful lighting. But the film-makers perhaps go too far in their quest for verisimilitude, pushing their rendering engines so far that all trace of digital distinctiveness disappears, leaving a very analogue world behind.

The light-cycles swerve pretty much like motorbikes. Explosions consume doomed buildings. There's even a gun that jams at an inconvenient moment. Dust swirls. Smoke drifts.

This corporeality divorces Legacy's milieu from the computers where it supposedly (and in large part, actually) resides. Add to that characters who behave far more like wetware than software, and Tron: Legacy begins to feel much like any other dystopian fantasy, albeit more neon than noir. There's the barest hint of a spookier, more contemplative mood towards its very end, which could bode well for the mooted threequel. But it comes too late to redeem Legacy.

Video-game designers have learned to their cost that the key to successfully updating a beloved classic is not better graphics or shinier hardware. Maintaining the user - User - experience is what counts. It's a pity the makers of Tron: Legacy didn't learn the same lesson.

It will be a pity for not having even an approximate increase in program power available. teh most powerful current home computers, can be approximately 30 Million times more pwoerful in raw throughput, than early 1980s home computers. Like Tron Legacy shows however, little of this power increase has actually gone into anything useful, making the computer more secure, more resiliant, more intelligent. Computers are still just reactive, as they have for almost 40 years, they just look a lot shinier. Real time raytracing in 3D at UHD resolutions. How will movie makers claim the costs of rendering 4k images, when a sub $10k super gaming rig will be able to generate it directly, to order?

All it takes is for Open Source versions of skeletal mechanics, real world modeling, true 3D Raytracing, script generation, actor modeling, musical and lighting style algorithms, and all the other methods that currently require the proactive input of humans, and teh home PC will be able to start generating more and more detailed situations from complex texts at first, then from vauger ideas or even mere mentions later.

IBM state they hope to have a supercomputer capable of equivalent processing capacity to the human brain in as little as 5 years. How does Hollywood expect to compete with the knowlege that within 15 years, anyone with a million dollars will be able to have a true Dream Machine, that cen generate Any image they, or more especially, it, can create?

A Pity. Tron Legacy. Lets make the images shiny, because we dare not use a more appropiate story line.

At least we get light cycles.

End Of Line.

Bill
on December 16, 2010 4:57 AM

With the first Tron being what it was, what kind of doofus would assume a sequel would be the next Godfather movie?

mik
on December 16, 2010 12:13 PM

Yawn, big beard in the sky please save us from movie reviewers who expect social commentary in every movie made.
You say its not fair to expect the movie to have much to say yet the the whole tone of this piece says otherwise. Of course the irony is that noir films commenting on this or that condition always seem just as cliched as a bog standard summer block buster but they add the ultimate sin of being bat crap boring.

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